1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vending machine and concurrently ice-box and, more particularly, to a vending machine and concurrently ice-box that has an integral form of a vending machine from which cold beverage and drink cans are obtained by putting a coin into it, and an ice-box where food is kept cool for a long time.
2. Discussion of Related Art
An ice-box is a box used to keep food cool for a long time and usually kept in a public place such as a fashionable hotel, etc. so as to provide paying guests with beverages and drinks.
When furnished in a hotel room, the ice-box is provided with a variety of beverage and drink cans for various tastes of the guests so that any paying guest can take beverages and drinks from it as he likes.
However, most of the related art ice-boxes are a closed box with no display function so that the guest has to open the door of the ice-box and see what kind of drinks are available.
For that reason, the related art ice-boxes are not so attractive to the paying guest visually, as a result of which the effect of sales promotion is deteriorated. Furthermore, an ordinary ice-box is designed to have multiple purposes and functions for a domestic use and therefore inadequate for sales of beverage and drink cans in a hotel room.
In addition, a service worker who takes care of the ice-box in the hotel must take the trouble to enter the room in person to check on what kind of drinks and how many drinks are taken by the guest and to charge the guest for the drinks right before the guest checks out. In a case where the ice-box is filled with beverage and drink cans of different kinds which determine the price of the individual beverage and drink cans, the service work has difficulty in billing the guest for the beverage or drink cans. There are some cases where the service worker charges the guest incorrectly so that he suffers from a large pecuniary loss. Therefore, most of ice-boxes have been managed in many hotels unavoidably under actual circumstances that a part of the sales amount for the beverage and drink cans in the ice-box is taken as a deficit. In some hotels, the guests are urged to deposit a certain amount of money in cash as prepayment for the use of the ice-box content during the check-in and repaid with a change before they check out.
Furthermore, there are some cases where the guest cannot remember accurately what beverages and drinks he had from the ice-box and takes much time in waiting for the confirmation of the service worker. In some cases, the guest is brought in a shameful situation when he remembers inaccurately. Those who use a hotel room equipped with no mini-bar has to take the trouble to call the service worker in order to order beverages or drinks. Since most of paying guests in a hotel room are reluctant to expose themselves to others, they usually give up ordering beverages or drinks and the ice-box in the room becomes useless.
In some rare cases, the hotel employs a terminal management system that automatically checks the beverages and drinks taken by the guest. However, such an automatic system is very expensive and ready to cause conflicts between the guest and the service worker frequently because the terminal management system may charge the guest even for an article moved slightly by mistake of the guest who is inexperienced in dealing with the system. The system is also disadvantageous in that it cannot receive articles out of a standard size.